Alice Munro's short stories

A well-deserved win

A win for a neglected genre

IS THE short story enjoying a renaissance? The genre of choice for writers as highly regarded as Jorge Luis Borges and John Cheever, short fiction in the past decade has got shorter and shorter shrift from publishers who believe it does not sell. That may be changing.

Just over a year ago, Jhumpa Lahiri's second collection, “Unaccustomed Earth”, leapt straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller list in its first week of publication. “Occasionally a comet lands and flattens the forest, sending the usual critters running,” one of the paper's bloggers commented. Then the London Sunday Times, usually a forum for bloody foreign reporting or high fashion, began commissioning short fiction of its own from such authors as Lionel Shriver and Ben Okri.

On May 27th the short story raised its longest applause yet when it was announced that Alice Munro, a 77-year-old Canadian, had won the Man Booker international prize, the first time a short-story writer has carried the day.

In search of what they call “an achievement in fiction”, the three judges had spent much of the past two years reading 300 books by more than 70 living authors. Ms Munro comes from southern Ontario, an area of considerable psychic murkiness and oddity. Her stories dwell on her own people and their peculiarities: their repressed emotions, respectable fronts, hidden sexual excesses, outbreaks of violence, lurid crimes and long-held grudges.

Ms Munro, who has long been honoured in her native country, does not enjoy the same international renown as some of her competitors for the prize, in part because she writes short stories rather than novels as thick as doorsteps.

The final judging saw the panel arguing over the merits of James Kelman's gritty social realism (“the Maxim Gorky of our day”, one judge said), Joyce Carol Oates's appeal to the head and Mario Vargas Llosa's call to the heart. Jane Smiley, who chaired the judges, said: “To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before.”

Or as Ms Munro's more famous fellow Canadian, Margaret Atwood, once remarked: “You call this writing? Alice Munro! Now that's writing.”